Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Herman Marczak - May 12, 1982

Right.

So they--everybody--a military operation can't go on all the time. They--eventually they, they stopped. In August they stopped, they stopped by Warsaw, you know, and they stop a certain Polish river. So they stopped there too, that gave them a chance to evacuate that factory--the Germans.

Oh, in other words they stopped right outside the area.

Not in the outside, maybe--it was not close to that area maybe, but let's say maybe a hundred miles away or something. They stopped--I don't know exactly where they stopped--but they stopped some place in Poland and we got to regroup, reorganize.

Mm-hm.

That gave them a chance to take out all the machinery and all the people and send us a few, a few hundred miles more south. So they send us to Częstochowa where the pope was. You know Częstochowa, that was--so there was the--this--and they organized there--the same plan they reorganized. It took 'em, it took 'em only a few weeks or maybe three, four weeks.

Was there a camp in Częstochowa?

Yeah, there was a camp there too.

What was the name of that camp?

That was Warta.

Warta?

Yeah.

Was a labor camp?

It was a labor camp. The same--for the same...

And there were Jews there?

There only Jews. There were no Polacks any more there.

Okay.

They didn't bring no Polacks in Skarżysko and they didn't have no skilled labor force in, in, in Częstochowa, because, you know, in, in that area there was no armaments industry. They didn't have no Polacks that would do that kind of work over there. In Skarżysko they had it.

Oh.

But there they didn't have it. But by that time the Jewish who been for a few years in the camp, they learned all those trades.

I see.

So they, they organized over there in a, in a very small, in a very small, you know, not as large as it was over there in, in, in Skarżysko, but it's not--and we started to do the same there, and it lasted 'til New Years, around New Years 1945. At that time, all of a sudden, strange planes started to fly over there--that area--everything. Every day, every second day, every third day--January 15th...